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The crime scene was fairly simple. A person, stabbed to death. The cause, however, was unknown.
Connor had found the blood trails, even those hastily scrubbed away, but found they led to nowhere. When he crouched on the floor and sampled the blood—
“Ugh, Connor! For fuck’s sake!”
—he found that it was the victim’s blood, not the murderer’s. Which brought them back to step one.
He did appreciate having his job back after the revolution, finally being allowed to work in the field and on homicide with Hank, sometimes. But cases like this that left his mind blank were frustrating. This woman deserved justice for what happened to her.
“Alright, alright.” Hank stepped over to him, as if sensing his inward frustration. “What do we know about the case so far?”
“The victim was stabbed. Twice. However that was not what killed her—though she would have eventually bled out from her wounds, the cause of death was strangulation. By Christmas lights.” He grimaced.
“Fuck, the hell’s wrong with this murderer?”
“I’m unsure, given I know very little about them…”
“Well, not nothing. You know that they went to extreme lengths to kill their victim. Could’ve left them to bleed out and got away quicker, but instead they decided to strangle them too. Seems like a crime of passion to me.”
“I guess so. And with crimes of passion, the murderer usually knows the victim in order to kill them with such emotion. I… Perhaps what else I can deduce about them from the scene. It might be wrong and in poor taste, but I believe this murder has something to do with Christmas.”
“Strangulation by fairy lights give it away?”
“That. Alone that would just be pure coincidence; maybe they were convenient to use at the time. But the clues around the murder scene. The toppled Christmas tree, from which the lights were taken from. The glass baubles shattered against the ground, some I preconstructed to have been thrown at the walls. And the writing on the wall.”
“The fuck is it with these people, writing shit on blood on the wall?”
“I guess it gets the message across. Unfortunately it’s mostly indistinguishable… but from what I can see, these clusters of blood flecks… are supposed to be holly berries?”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Indeed. I… don’t know what this all means. Maybe there is no meaning. Maybe the crime was done with some connection to the season and they went away with it.”
“Yeah. Well, it isn’t a lot to go on, but it’s not nothing. You finished investigating?”
“Almost. I just need to check the upstairs bedroom.”
“Alright. Five minutes, try not to worry too much if you can’t find shit. Some cases are like this.”
He nodded, looking to the woman once more before heading up the stairs. He would solve this; he had to.
That attitude in mind, he took in the final room of the crime scene with a careful eye. Hardly anything had been marked as evidence with yellow signs here. The murder had taken place downstairs and nothing seemed out of the ordinary here.
Still, he scoured the room. Found no traces of blood. Maybe—
Maybe he was looking for the wrong thing.
The one lead they had: Christmas. He and Hank had deduced the crime had something to do with Christmas. So, sweeping his gaze back over the room, he looked for that instead.
Immediately, something caught his eye. A small plant on the bed. He’d never seen it in relation to the season before, but his scans told him it was to do with Christmas.
Taking it in his hand, he studied it closely. Nothing on the leaves, but on the glistening white berries—
Specks of blood. Something told him that this wasn’t the victim’s. Finally, a lead.
He brought his finger against the sample of blood, finding something else mixing with it too. Ah, the berry had been burst and its liquid had seeped into the sample. He shrugged, hoping his scan would distinguish the blood from the rest, before placing it on his tongue.
It burnt. The tip of his tongue burnt where it was placed, where it travelled down the veins and wires, sent off to be analysed. The results came back jarred and distorted—
Error
Error
Error
Something was contaminating the blood sample. Mistletoe. The berries of a mistletoe.
Something told him it was dangerous. His scans also told him the identity of the murderer. He stumbled around to get this important information to Hank downstairs—
But as he turned his vision distorted, pixels tearing through, red and horrible and jarring. He stumbled again, reaching out blindly as the world became a sea around him, legs moving through tar and finding nothing
Until his cheek hit the rough scratch of the carpet.
The murderer. The murderer. He had to send the report to Hank. He… he didn’t know what was happening. But he brought a hand up to his LED—
Only for someone to grasp his hand from behind him, yank it away from his only source of communication.
“Can’t believe you licked it.”
The voice came in, something… familiar. It had to feel familiar. Like he knew the face it was coming from. Had seen them before.
They lifted him up roughly, turning him on his back, and even through the haze he saw the murderer. The man who had strangled to death the woman downstairs with Christmas lights.
“But that’s fine. Didn’t know that shit worked on androids but now it does—you’ll be my next victim.”
A flash of lights: the man had the missing murder weapon clutched in his hands. Plugged into the far wall, the lights were flashing red and blue and red and blue and red and blue
Until it matched the pulse of his LED. Red, blue, red, blue, as the wire caught around his neck and tugged.
“Stupid bitch. She can’t leave me at Christmas. She can’t have ever thought she’d get away with it! And now some damn android—”
Hank
“starts licking berries and thinks he’s fooled me!”
Androids didn’t need to breathe. But the wires were cutting closer, tearing through synthetic skin and starting to cut into his chassis. Any deeper and they’d slice the fine wires in his neck, leaking thirium out in a pool around him. Blue, blue, blue.
He didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to be the next victim, throat choked up with mistletoe and the imprint of fairy lights around his neck. Despite the sluggishness of his limbs he kicked upwards.
It didn’t push the man off, but it did slam his leg back into the ground with force. The man howled at the noise, tumbling back off Connor and looking left and right, but within moments officers were running up the stairs, door slamming open. The mistletoe murderer was finally apprehended.
“Connor!”
He smiled weakly as Hank came over to him, working in a hurry to pull the lights from around his neck, chucking them aside.
“They’re—they’re gone, why do you look like that? Your light’s fuckin’ red, you…”
“It’s… mistletoe.”
“What?”
“Mistletoe. It’s a parasite. And it’s poisonous. Not… extremely so. It’s simply messing with my systems.”
“…do I want to know how you ingested mistletoe?”
“I licked it.”
“Of course you did. Shit, poison? Do you need to get it out?”
“No, it will… it’ll work it’s course. However it’s very unpleasant. Can we get back home?”
“Sure we can. But… can I take you to a technician first?”
“Ugh.”
“Please?”
“Fine. But I don’t need—” his sentence cut off with a cough, droplets of blue blood spluttering over Hank’s shocked face.
“Technician. Now.”